Deadly stroke risks: Sex, coffee and blowing your nose

Drinking coffee, having sex or even blowing your nose raises the risk of bursting a brain aneurysm you might not even realize you have.

“No one has ever systematically dealt with the potential triggers before,” study co-author Dr. Ale Algra of Utrecht Stroke Center in the Netherlands told the Star on Friday.

The triggers, he said, set off a short, quick blood pressure spike which appears to help explode the affected brain artery.

Drinking coffee led the risk factors (increasing it by 10 per cent), followed by physical exercise, nose-blowing, sex and straining to defecate.

“This should not be interpreted to mean that people should not exercise,” said Algra. If you exercise and are in good health, this lowers your risk of forming an aneurysm in the first place.

Only 2 per cent of the population will develop an intracranial aneurysm, which seldom has symptoms. Even fewer rupture, Algra said. The silent killer embedded in the brain is usually only discovered through a scan for something else.

Posted by Zakaria Virk
on May 6, 2011. Filed under Canada.
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